Researchers at TU Wien (Vienna) have developed an ultra-fast image sensor with a built-in neural network; the sensor can be trained to recognize certain objects. They describe their work on ultrafast machine vision in a paper in Nature. Machine vision technology has taken huge leaps in recent years, and is now becoming an integral part of various intelligent systems, including autonomous vehicles and robotics. Usually, visual information is captured by a frame-based camera, converted into a digital format and processed afterwards using a machine-learning algorithm such as an artificial neural network (ANN). The large amount of (mostly redundant) data passed through the entire signal chain, however, results in low frame rates and high power consumption.

Waymo, the self-driving technology company, just came out with the modestly named Content Search, but it could have huge implications for advancing autonomous vehicle technology. Waymo's new Content Search tool allows engineers to catalogue and find billions of images. As explained on its blog, Waymo and Google Research, both divisions of parent company Alphabet, collaborated to create Content Search. By leveraging the search technology similar to what powers Google Photos and Google Image, Waymo engineers can now quickly locate just about any object stored in Waymo's driving history and logs through 20 million miles of collecting data on the road. In essence, the Content Search turns all the objects into a searchable catalogue, accurately tracking billions of images.

Image classification tasks occupy the majority of machine learning experiments. Their critical usage in medical diagnosis, digital photography, self-driving cars and many others have attracted researchers to innovate models that would give near perfect prediction of the target object. Here, we have compiled a list of top-performing methods according to papers with code, on the widely popular datasets that are used for benchmarking the image classification models. ImageNet consists of more than 14 million images comprising classes such as animals, flowers, everyday objects, people and many more. Training a model on ImageNet gives it an ability to match the human-level vision, given the diversity of data.

Over the years, the basic retail experience has remained more or less the same for the consumers. You go to a store, you look for the right product, and you make a purchase. But for the retailers, it is ever-changing. Analyzing consumer behavior is one of the biggest challenges that CPGs all around the world face. With increasing complexities, traditional auditing methods have proved inefficient.

The news: A new type of artificial eye, made by combining light-sensing electronics with a neural network on a single tiny chip, can make sense of what it's seeing in just a few nanoseconds, far faster than existing image sensors. Why it matters: Computer vision is integral to many applications of AI--from driverless cars to industrial robots to smart sensors that act as our eyes in remote locations--and machines have become very good at responding to what they see. But most image recognition needs a lot of computing power to work. Part of the problem is a bottleneck at the heart of traditional sensors, which capture a huge amount of visual data, regardless of whether or not it is useful for classifying an image. Crunching all that data slows things down.

Recent advancements in artificial intelligence and machine learning have hugely contributed to the growth of Image Recognition and Object Detection in retail. While Image Recognition and Object Detection are used interchangeably, these are two different techniques. Image Recognition is the process of analyzing an input image and predicting its category (also called as a class label) from a set of categories. For instance, consider an automatic store checkout scenario. The user displays an SKU in front of a camera that is powered by an Image Recognition software. The software, when trained on all the SKUs present in the store, can predict the SKU shown by the user as one among all the SKUs.

We propose an unsupervised method that, given a word, automatically selects non-abstract senses of that word from an online ontology and generates images depicting the corresponding entities. When faced with the task of learning a visual model based only on the name of an object, a common approach is to find images on the web that are associated with the object name, and then train a visual classifier from the search result. As words are generally polysemous, this approach can lead to relatively noisy models if many examples due to outlier senses are added to the model. We argue that images associated with an abstract word sense should be excluded when training a visual classifier to learn a model of a physical object. While image clustering can group together visually coherent sets of returned images, it can be difficult to distinguish whether an image cluster relates to a desired object or to an abstract sense of the word.

Training large-scale image recognition models is computationally expensive. This raises the question of whether there might be simple ways to improve the test performance of an already trained model without having to re-train or fine-tune it with new data. Here, we show that, surprisingly, this is indeed possible. The key observation we make is that the layers of a deep network close to the output layer contain independent, easily extractable class-relevant information that is not contained in the output layer itself. We propose to extract this extra class-relevant information using a simple key-value cache memory to improve the classification performance of the model at test time.

Metric learning, aiming to learn a discriminative Mahalanobis distance matrix M that can effectively reflect the similarity between data samples, has been widely studied in various image recognition problems. Most of the existing metric learning methods input the features extracted directly from the original data in the preprocess phase. What's worse, these features usually take no consideration of the local geometrical structure of the data and the noise existed in the data, thus they may not be optimal for the subsequent metric learning task. In this paper, we integrate both feature extraction and metric learning into one joint optimization framework and propose a new bilevel distance metric learning model. Specifically, the lower level characterizes the intrinsic data structure using graph regularized sparse coefficients, while the upper level forces the data samples from the same class to be close to each other and pushes those from different classes far away.

Deep artificial neural networks, trained with labeled data sets are widely used in numerous vision and robotics applications today. In terms of AI, these are called reflex models, referring to the fact that they do not self-evolve or actively adapt to environmental changes. As demand for intelligent robot control expands to many high level tasks, reinforcement learning and state based models play an increasingly important role. Herein, in computer vision and robotics domain, we study a novel approach to add reinforcement controls onto the image recognition reflex models to attain better overall performance, specifically to a wider environment range beyond what is expected of the task reflex models. Follow a common infrastructure with environment sensing and AI based modeling of self-adaptive agents, we implement multiple types of AI control agents. To the end, we provide comparative results of these agents with baseline, and an insightful analysis of their benefit to improve overall image recognition performance in real world.